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Bezos Seeks Amazon Honor System-Related Patents

Posted by Hemos on Mon Sep 23, 2002 06:56 AM
from the ebay-comes-a-shaking dept.
Patents
theodp writes "When Amazon's Honor System debuted, some questioned if Amazon would try to patent it. More than 18 months later, the USPTO has provided the answer with the 8-29 publication of patent applications 20020120568 ("User-to-user payment service with payee-specific pay pages") and 20020120567 ("Hosted services for collecting payments from and providing personalized content to web site visitors"). Both list Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as an inventor and use the Amazon Honor System to illustrate a commercial implementation of the inventions." Hmm...wouldn't eBay's point system be prior art in this situation?
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  • Then what about all of the ad banners that are affiliate based and have been around for ages and ages? Pay per click affiliates?

  • Knock Knock. PayPal and eBay ? Hello?? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hello PayPal and eBay. What are they going to do to this one? Point system. User to User Payment system. Hrm. I wish that people like this would stop doing this as it impedes on the development of eCommerce and related business.

  • Prior Art? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cenonce (597067) <anthony_t @ m ac.com> on Monday September 23 2002, @07:02AM (#4310523)

    Prior art!?! The novel and non-obvious requirement is what's gettin' me!!!

    -A

    • Re:Prior Art? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Golias (176380) on Monday September 23 2002, @07:27AM (#4310586)
      Nearly all software creations fail this simple litmus test. It's about time that those of us in the industry lobby congress to establish that only copyright, not patents, should be the protection which software enjoys.

      As long as you are not stealing code, there is nothing unethical about writing a program that does the same thing as somebody else's program. The only "invention" involved would be the versitile Finite State Machine ("the PC", for you patent lawyers), which allows these applications to work.

      I can't take out a patent on a method of using my car to light my house. Likewise, I should not be allowed to patent a new application for my computer.

      IANAL, blah blah blah

      • Re:Prior Art? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hburch (98908) on Monday September 23 2002, @07:56AM (#4310681)
        I can't take out a patent on a method of using my car to light my house

        Are you sure about that?

        All inventions are new application of existing technology (ignore patents on DNA, since that is not always new). You take a bit of this, a bit of that, and pretty soon you have a car.

        Since I program, I think in terms of software. Libraries exist, but I can create a new routine that uses the functions. Just because all I did was find a new application for libraries does not mean I did not create something, nor that what I did not have value.

        To take your argument to the extreme: "I'm sorry, this invention is just a new application for atoms."

        I do agree that "do X with a computer", where X has been around forever does not seem very innovative. On the other hand, if it was not innovative, why was it not done earlier? (no demand, no one pursued, no one had thought of it (but that would make it innovative)). On the other other hand, just because it is innovative does not mean that it should qualify for a patent.
        • Just because all I did was find a new application for libraries does not mean I did not create something, nor that what I did not have value.

          Nobody is debating that.

          You put work into your software, and you get recognition for it, in the way of copyright protection

          If someone else were to do solve the same problem you did, in the same way, why should they have to pay you? They put in the same amount of work, they created something - why should you be rewarded for their work if they didn't use anything you did?

          Patents are supposed to protect a specific solution to a problem - they are not supposed to protect the problem itself.

          if it was not innovative, why was it not done earlier?

          Perhaps it was, but nobody thought that it was worth patenting, because it's so obvious.
        • I do agree that "do X with a computer", where X has been around forever does not seem very innovative. On the other hand, if it was not innovative, why was it not done earlier?

          Is it that it wasn't done earlier, or is it that the people who have done it had better things to do with their time than turn their sense of self-importance into an abuse of the patent system?
      • Nearly all software creations fail this simple litmus test.

        Has it occurred to anyone that maybe the patent office is smarter than
        we give them credit for. It's possible they realize that these patents
        are all unenforceable and is granting them in the hope that the whole
        software patent system implodes from the sheer number of bad patents.
        When it becomes clear that 80% of software patents are bad then they
        will suggest to the congress that this part of the patent system be
        scrapped. So in effect they are letting the system fall apart by
        inaction. Lets try to patent the bubble sort and see what happens:^)


  • Prior Art (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tuxedo-steve (33545) on Monday September 23 2002, @07:04AM (#4310524)
    Hmm...wouldn't eBay's point system be prior art in this situation?
    If someone does have evidence of prior art in a case like this, is there some procedure for bringing it to the attention of the patent office? I mean, we obviously can't rely on the good people at the USPTO to do their homework - surely it's in the best interests of the tech community to do it for them, in cases like these?

    If someone knows of prior art, posting it on Slashdot is not going to help. It needs to be nipped in the bud, by putting it in the face of these patent-happy bureaucrats.
    • As I understand it, prior art has to be brought up during legal proceedings.
    • Prior art can be cited to the Patent Office pursuant to 35 USC Section 301 and 37 CFR Section 501. These sections specifically relate to issued patents, however, so it is unclear whether anything sent to the patent office would be placed in the file wrapper of the application. It is worth a shot, anyway, and should also be sent directly to the applicant so there can be no claim that the applicant wasn't aware of it during prosecution. I glanced at the published application and at least the first claim seems to be related to paying for "content" with the one click system through an external service provider.

      • Re:Prior Art (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        www.DummyNews.com uses PayPal to bill for it's content. 1 Dollar donation to http://mamefans.metropoliglobal.com/lista.php give you quicker downloads (by not waiting in a queue) so it's content is dynamic based on payment as well. I'm sure there are like 1,000s of other sites
        • I know PayPal gets a (perhaps deservingly) kick in the nads every now and then for various reasons, but they really seem like a better alternative than whatever scheme Amazon is coming up with. Not only are they already much more ubiquitous, but you can "donate" as little as one cent through PayPal.

          PayPal even has a membership system through which you can opt to provide your customers a monthly recurring payment.

    • If a patent is accepted by the PO and later rejected in court, because of prior art or obviousness, then the responsible people at the PO should pay all the legal fees from their own pockets. Maybe this would help increase their awareness in the examination process.
      • Who are the responsible people? The examiner? with his limited time to examine a patent application and a limited library or resource materials to work from? The commissionier? who must deal with a Congress that already takes fees paid to the Patent Office and uses them to fund non-PTO matters? The citizen? such as yourself who only criticizes rather than calls his congressman to complain about quality and states a willingness to be taxed more if that is what it takes?
        • The examiner? with his limited time to examine a patent application and a limited library or resource materials to work from?
          I admid, there may be cases, where the prior art is really hard to find. Here an examiner may be excused. Anyway, I suspect, the examiner has at least brain enough, to see obviousness. A patent like the discussed one, or "one-click", or the "y2k-window" patent shouldn't really pass the test.

          The commissionier? who must deal with a Congress that already takes fees paid to the Patent Office and uses them to fund non-PTO matters?
          Does he sign the patent claim to become a true patent? - If this is the case, see above.

          The citizen?
          We pay anyway.

          such as yourself who only criticizes rather than calls his congressman ...
          There is no such thing as my congressman. Yesterday I voted "void", because non of the available candidates represented a position that I share.

          to complain about quality and states a willingness to be taxed more if that is what it takes?
          I am quite sure, if we can keep the EU from adapting patents on software and business methods, there will be no need to increase taxes.
          sign here [eurolinux.org]

    • Submitting Prior Art... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      (* Posting as AC in order to protect the innocent *)

      I have a friend who is a patent attorney. Someone in an open source software project that I work on recently discovered an application for a patent that looked like what we were doing. So I asked my buddy about submitting prior art. Here's what he said:

      Below is the rule (37 CFR 1.99, if you want to look it up) for submitting prior art. Summed up: you pay $180 plus you have to serve it upon the applicant's attorney, which will cost a few dollars, too. As far as the submission deadline, 2 months from publication [of the application - AC] or prior to notice of allowance, you have no way of knowing if a notice of allowance has been sent. So you have no choice but to send it blind.

      I assume that a notice of allowance occurs before the granting of a patent. (Maybe it is the granting of the patent....??)

      In our case, it turned out that the patent application was for something substantially different than what our project was doing. Although we do some things in common, since we don't do everything that was claimed in that patent application, we could not be infringing on that patent. And there are some things in that patent application that we will never do. So we decided that we had little to fear from this patent application.

      As far as the Amazon stuff, submitting prior art

      1. costs money
      2. has deadlines
      I have no intention of paying $180+ to submit prior art for a patent application that I'm not personally worried about infringing. In this case, if this were just a patent application, I'd want to let ebay know about it and let them decide whether or not they want to pay the $$ to submit the prior art.

      Second, if the deadlines on the submission of prior art are expired, I would think that the only thing to do is to wait to get sued and then collect evidence of prior art for the trial. Again, this is only something that someone who is possibly infringing has to worry about.

      If you consider the cost of the prior art submission and the cost of defending a lawsuit. $180+ doesn't sound like much anymore...

      $.02

  • Donations / Payments (Score:4, Insightful)

    by z_gringo (452163) <`z_gringo' `at' `hotmail.com'> on Monday September 23 2002, @07:06AM (#4310529)
    From the article:

    Dubbed the Amazon Honor System, the new payment method will allow Web sites to solicit small donations from visitors or charge for content on a pay-per-view basis. The system will tie into Amazon's one-click payment feature and Amazon's customer database, meaning that third-party Web sites will seemingly recognize Amazon customers and make it easy for them to donate money.

    That makes it sound like it's just for donations. However, with a "user-to-user" payment system that really works, It sounds like a great market might be in international money transfers. I mean Wester Union charges $30 and up to send money. A few others are somewhat cheaper, but this would be dramatically cheaper.

    Oddly, from reading the article, it doesn't sound like anyone over there has even thought of that angle..

    It sounds like a good idea to me...

  • I don't buy from Amazon and neither should you.

    TWW

    • Amen to that, but it's not a simple answer: it doesn't make the patents go away. Even if Amazon goes bankrupt, someone will pick up the patents and probably be even more litigious about them. The best we can do is send a message that this sort of nonsense is not appreciated by customers.
      • Amen to that, but it's not a simple answer: it doesn't make the patents go away.

        If companies that take out trivial patents like this kept getting punished by losing their customers then the patents would go away. But I'm not holding my breath.

        TWW

    • Or, as Dave Winer has put it, "No more pesos for Señor Bezos!"

      Alternatives include Barnes and Noble [bn.com] and The Tattered Cover [tatteredcover.com].

  • How about these guys? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by melvin22 (523080) on Monday September 23 2002, @07:06AM (#4310531) Homepage
    I think their ideas [stanford.edu] are dated back to April of this year. Now the question is: can their stuff be interpreted as pretty much being the same (therefore prior "art"?) as the Amazon patents? Or do I just not know what the hell I'm talking about at 7AM on a monday?

  • *sigh* (Score:5, Funny)

    by EmagGeek (574360) <eric...hidle@@@gmail...com> on Monday September 23 2002, @07:09AM (#4310535) Homepage Journal
    I can see it now... Now anyone who transacts personal business on the 'net has to pay Amazon for the privelege if they use the "honor system" for payment and shipping... basically, trusting someone will no longer be free.

    The Patent Office has become ridiculous. They'll grant a patent application for just about anything because it generates filing fee revenue.

    I'll file the following Patent now: "Method of generating income by filing obvious patents and suing everyone in sight." That way, I can pay off my student loans....

    *sigh*

    • Can you patent the patent application process?
    • > The Patent Office has become ridiculous. They'll grant a patent application for just about anything because it generates filing fee revenue.

      Don't they keep the filing fee even if they reject the patent?
      • Yes, they keep the filing fee even if it is rejected, however, they lose filing fee revenue if people know they can't file patents based on a certain structure.

        Take away software patents, you lose software patent filing fees.
    • THey will grant an application because ANYONE can send in an application with a filing fee. Should they reject all applications from particular inventors. It is STUPID to blame the patent office on anything about these patent applications because the patent office, in all likelyhood, has not examined these patents at all. Because of the delay of examining patent applications, almost all patent applications are published before they are even given a first examination.
    • Amazon.com's not alone in patenting stupid stuff. Remember the Satiewire bit CDNow Wins Patent for Loss-Based Revenue Model [satirewire.com].
  • I suspect Amazon is trying to *avoid* a patent battle with this one, rather than trying to start one. Maybe eBay does have prior art, but I highly doubt they're going to bother each other.
  • with payee-specific pages ... isnt that a checkbook?
  • ...now I can no longer be honorable as being honorable has been patented. Crap. Anyone out there have any good advice on how to be a scumbag? How about getting into the software patent game... that sorta takes the honor out of ya.
  • What about the International Starcraft League, and all the other leagues that were up in WArcraft II days that all used points and ranking systems based on your games won. But also had points based on your sportsmanship.

    THis is definitly an idea that came out of the gaming and Forum community.

    Karma anyone?
  • At the end of the day, what we're battling with is the continued ignorance of the general populace, and most of the patent examiners, on some of the most simple IT topics.

    I've often dreamed of the idea of mandatory computer certification courses (something like the driving test); without a certification, one would not be allowed to create policy, pass laws, or permit patents which related to these topics. The field is sufficiently complicated, and we shouldn't have to expect a judge to understand how a program loads, or the GIF file format, without helping him/her out a little.

    Incidentally, can anyone show me an example of a "big" company (like IBM or Amazon) which has had a patent knocked back? I'm beginning to wonder whether tired patent examiners just rubber stamp important looking documents originating at these companies...
  • Amazon is patenting the way they collect money through a web site. How can a patent even be allowed for such a thing? What value-add / innovation are we seeing here? Why haven't we ever seen patents for the following:

    1. Selling trinkets on the front lawn for marked down prices. Information is available via salesperson (aka "home owner") at cash register. (In laymans terms, a "yard sale")

    2. Purchasing commercial grade food and retail products by using a specialized magnetic storage device. (aka grocery shopping and paying with a credit card).

    Ok, well hopefully you get the point. Aren't patents were supposed to be for improvements in technology? It seems that companies like Amazon are only getting patents because "we thought of it first, and we'll sue you if you think of it too, nanny-nanny boo boo".

    I think it is time we need some patent reform laws. Why should Amazon, who may have some good ideas, force everyone else to have sucky/inconvenient e-commerce web sites because virtually everything possible is patented (okay, this may be an overstatement, but probably not too far from the truth)?

    In the case of Amazon, if someone else tries to implement an Honor System like functionality. This is a patent on ORGANIZING INFORMATION. So does that mean if I am running an e-commerce site and want to provide the same kind of info to buyers (ie, how sellers behave or whatever it is) that I can get sued? Probably. That is messed up in my opinion.

  • As a law clerk at a patent firm, I would like to clarify that all patent applications filed with the USPTO must be published after 18 months regardless of whether or not a patent will issue. (Exception if you intend to file only in the US). The publication of these applications affords no protection to the applicants. Only in the event of a granted patent will this be recognized as novel by the USPTO and granted the protection of the patent system.
  • The sites referenced in this article make it sound like this is the first and only way for small web-sites to get payments. This clearly isn't the case; Paypal [paypal.com] has been delivering this functionality for a couple of years now, and even Amazon's earlier zShops [amazon.com] worked for a lot of small-time web stores.

    What is important to point out is that not only are the technology and methods of all these approaches different, but the legal standards and rules of conduct all vary as well. For example, lots of folks despise Paypal and Amazon's zShops never really took off, in part because they closely regulate sellers (but for other reasons related to Amazon's fundamental business model too.)

  • Both list Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as an inventor...

    It's good to be the king, eh Jeff? God Bless non-disclosure agreements and contracts with IP ownership clauses.
  • Since when has it been possible to patent a business model? Sheesh!
  • Since when is art "invention"?

    Since when is invention inspiration-less?

  • It's *Just* An Application (Score:5, Informative)

    by hawksmoor (596095) <adamlcox@earthlink . n et> on Monday September 23 2002, @10:15AM (#4311733) Homepage Journal
    As an assistant to a patent attorney, I think I can say that everyone is being a little bit alarmist here. These are patent applications, not granted patents. You can file an application for any old stupid thing, and it will be published. That has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the patent will be granted. And, while I'd be the last person to say the USPTO is a flawless organization, I can assure you that the examiners do not rubber stamp applications which come from large entities--although I sort of wish they would.
  • I switched from Amazon to other on-line book sellers after their one-click patent; I recommend you do the same.
  • things from amazon ? Wierd....I've not used amazon since one-click patent days....Fark em
  • I wonder how long it will be before Amazon patents "a method of using a gullible technical books publisher to generate free press". Will Tim O'Reilly be "working with" Amazon to "resolve" this issue this time?

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